Yes, it was going to be a long journey to Mumbai in a Sleeper Class coach of the Mumbai-bound Madras Express. It was the year 1997 and a beautiful November morning in Chennai and a perfect day for travel, but somehow with my Lalita Pawar around, the day just didn’t seem so beautiful any more.

Once settled, Lalita Pawar turned her attention to look at her co-passengers. And that was my cue to hastily bury my nose in a book. It was a look that I had seen many-a-times during my travels. It was a look that promised to dig out personal information from a co-passenger, particularly a young woman travelling alone, and I could almost see Lalita Pawar rubbing her hands with gleeful anticipation when she saw me. Though I could feel her eyes boring into me, I did not look up from my book.

The train soon departed and the passengers settled down for the long journey ahead. Lalita Pawar spoke non-stop at the top of her screechy voice. She spoke about her dislike for people who drank, smoked, gambled, lied, those who did not respect elders, those who re-married, and so on. She would stop now and then to berate her daughter-in-law for something or the other, or complain about the quality of the food and tea served in trains, shout at her granddaughter, blah blah blah. My dislike kept increasing with every passing minute, and I just hoped that I did not have to speak with her.

Well, as they say, if wishes were horses I would be a very rich woman today ! 

Photo source: http://goindia.about.com/od/rail/tp/Indian-Train-Accommodations.htm

When more passengers entered the coach at the train’s next halt, I took my eyes away from my book to look at the new arrivals. Big mistake. Lalita Pawar was just waiting for an opportunity like this to begin her “interrogation session”.

“Hello”, she smiled.

I replied with a namaste.

“So, where are you going?” she asked.

“Mumbai”, I said and went back to my book.

Not that it deterred her. She leaned across and poked me on the knee forcing me to look up. “Are you married?”

Here it comes, I sighed inwardly. This was going to be a long journey indeed, and a painful one too. In an instant, I made up my mind to spin a story far removed from reality and give her a life story that would, hopefully, make her stop talking to me.

“Yes, I am.”

“How many children?”

“Three.”

“Three?” Lalita Pawar looked incredulously at me and gave me a once over. “Sons or daughters?”

“All sons.”

“You must have been very young when you got married.”

“Er… I was 18,” I said rather coyly.

“What was the need of 3 children? You already had two sons. Surely, you could have done family planning?”

“Well,” I said bashfully, “We wanted a daughter.”

“A daughter? When you have sons ! How old are your sons?”

“The oldest is 6, the second 4 and the youngest 2 years.”

“They are too young to be left at this age”, she declared imperiously.”And who is taking care of them while you are away? Must be your mother!”

“No actually, it is my mother-in-law who is taking care of them.” And for added measure, I said, “She is the best mother-in-law in the world.”

Lalita Pawar did not look very pleased, as if my “mother-in-law” was a disgrace to that community. “Hmm… And what does your husband do?”

Here I paused and said delicately and morosely, “He is no more.”

This silenced Lalita Pawar to such an extent that she went quiet and looked away. I heaved a sigh of relief and went back to my book, hoping for the silence to last. Unfortunately, this only lasted for about an hour or so, when suddenly, my leg was poked again and Phase II of the interrogation resumed.

“So, how did he die?”

“Who?” For a minute, I had forgotten the story I had spun.

“Your husband ! Who else?” came the sharp retort.

“Oh him ! Well, he drank himself to death,” I told her in a matter-of-fact tone.

She looked at me with disapproval as if I was responsible for my “husband’s” death. She fell into a brooding silence once again and I went back to my book. This time the silence lasted through lunch and the afternoon nap. She must have been thinking about my “life story”, because as soon as she got up Phase III of the interrogation commenced.

“Where are you from? Mumbai or Madras?

“I’m from Mumbai.”

“Then what were you doing in Madras?”

“I had some work here.”

“What work?”

This was the moment I was waiting for. I hesitated for effect. And Lalita Pawar cooed and said encouragingly, “Tell me, beta. What work did you have that you had to leave your 3 children behind?”

“Well, aunty, since you insist, I’ll tell you.” I told her sweetly. “I had come to Madras to meet a prospective groom.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. Well, actually you could not with the train rattling away. But you know what I mean, don’t you?

“B-but what about your family, your mother-in-law? How could she agree?” she stammered out after she got over the initial shock.

“My mother-in-law? She is the one who arranged this match.”

This was the last straw. Lalita Pawar went nearly apoplectic with disapproval and looked away. And that was the end of our interaction. For the rest of the trip, she was the one avoiding eye contact and I was the one staring at her.

 ♦  ♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

In the course of my travels, I have met different kinds of people and have come away with pleasant memories and some not-so-pleasant memories. But none of the people I met were like my “Lalita Pawar”—so obnoxious and so thoroughly dislikeable. I could have been rude or just ignored her questions, but in my experience I have found that this does not work. Anyway, Lalita Pawar would have poked me on my knee, till I answered her ! Even though many years have passed since this incident, I had no trouble at all in recalling this encounter and reproducing it here. As I wrote this post, I wondered if I would have reacted differently had I met her now. Perhaps, I would have switched the conversation back to her and her family instead of spinning a yarn. That is what I do these days when people ask me too many personal questions. 

A popular saying goes that one cannot really choose one’s relatives. I’d like to add co-passengers also here, as one cannot choose them either. Or can we?

Note: The usage of the name “Lalita Pawar” is not meant to be derogatory towards the late actress. It is a reference to the roles of the evil, scheming mother-in-law that she portrayed on the silver screen.

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This post has been submitted for the “Around the World with Expedia” contest organised by Indiblogger in association with, Expedia.

Do you have a similar story to share? If so I would love to hear about it here. And if you liked this post, and even if you didn’t, do stop by and leave a comment.

The Shoe House, which is supposedly inspired by the nursery rhyme “The Old Woman who Lived in the Shoe”, was the star attraction for us. A larger than life shoe-shaped house, painted a bright yellow with red shoe laces, a red roof and red chimney—it was every kid’s dream house. We would climb the narrow stairs in twos and threes to the balcony and wave out to the other classmates and feel that the Shoe House and the world belonged to us ! Ah the thrill and joy that little climb gave us.

The Shoe House at Kamala Nehru Park, Mumbai

My family left Mumbai in 1980 and that was the last I saw it. Till last February, that is, when I visited the Kamala Nehru Park on a sudden whim. I was delighted to see that the Shoe House was still standing and children were still running in and out of it. What was surprising was that there were so many adults who competing with the children and running up and down the stairs, and posing and getting their photographs taken. I too waited my turn and climbed up to the balcony and waved to the people standing below. And felt on top of the world, with all my nostalgic memories rushing back.

Of course, the yellow of the Shoe House had faded, the shoe looked dirty and scuffed, but it was charming nevertheless. But then so is nostalgia, isn’t it?

Mumbai Lens is a photographic series which, as the name suggests, is Mumbai-centric and is an attempt to capture the various moods of the city through my camera lens.

With the Twitter boom, can its influence on literature be far behind? Not at all, this is where two teenagers, Alexander Aciman and Emmet  Rensin, rewrote over 80 classics and some recent bestsellers as a series of tweets. And thus was Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter born.

Twitterature (Penguin Books, 2009, pp. xiv + 146) is an attempt at “facing and understanding … the greatest art of all arts: Literature” through Twitter. The authors, both 19-year-old students at the University of Chicago at the time of publication of the book, wrote it with the intention of mastering “the literature of the civilized world, while relieving [the reader of] the burdensome task of reading it” in its original form. In other words, Twitterature is a retelling of literature in as tweet stories in Twitter language.

Aciman and Rensin have taken a wide range of literature for their Twitterature endeavour. Greek classics (Oedipus, The Iliad, Lysistrata, The Aeneid), Russian literature (Anna Karenina, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment), French Literature (The Three Musketeers), Shakespeare (King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest), English Literature (The Old Man and the Sea, Emma, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes), and many more can be found as tweet stories in this book.

Each classic featured in Twitterature has been rewritten in a series of tweets with the author “getting” an appropriate and extremely creative twitter handle. For example, Crime and Punishment’s Fyodor Dostoevsky is @RobPeterPayPaul, while Moby Dick’s Herman Melville is @greatwhitetale, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is @TheRealDesparateHousewife. Some books have more than one twitter handle as in the case of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: @JulieBaby and @DefNotaHomeo.

The tweet stories in Twitterature are a mixed bag. Some tweets work…

Usually a man wills his home to his wife or kids. But sometimes he wills it to a distant relative, so when he dies you’re out on your ass. (@FirstThoughtBestThought, Pride and Prejudice)

My royal father gone and nobody seems to care. (@OedipusGothplex, Hamlet)

@Montague @Capulet Can’t we all just get along? (@DefNotaHomeo, Romeo and Juliet)

Robert Downey Jr Playing me in a film? Totally cool. Perfect. (@KeepDiggingWatson, Sherlock Holmes)

I wish my parents had died impressively. Like Harry Potter; that kid has got one hell of an orphan story. (@ToEyreIsHuman, Jane Eyre)

… and some tweets don’t:

A former student of mine called. He wants me to do a house call. (@BleedingGums, Dracula)

The walk was a bad idea. I met a prisoner who demanded bread and a file. He looks like a pederast. And a murderer. Amber Alert? (@piMp, Great Expectations)

Each story in Twitterature is told in about 20 or so tweets. The language is contemporary, informal, wicked, irreverent, politically incorrect, sexist, and has just about everything that will appeal to a young reader. It is also full of acronyms generally used in Twitter, for which the authors have very thoughtfully provided a glossary to serve as “a guide to this book’s obscure and esoteric terminologies and idioms for the benefit of luddites and old-timers that they may understand and enjoy the humor and wordplay herein contained.” (pg. 134)

The authors claim that by presenting the classics as tweet stories, one is relieved of the burden of actually reading them in the original. Now, I haven’t read all the books in this collection, and particularly none from the Greek Literature collection. But because I know the gist of those stories, I could follow the tweet stories. But for those books which I have not read like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the tweet stories did not convey anything. But the tweet stories of the ones that I have read were highly enjoyable, especially Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Hamlet, The Tempest, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Though Twitterature is a mixed bag, as a book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would have loved to see some more classics and some of my favourite books (for example, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, How Green was My Valley) in this collection. It is a great book to get a conversation going as also a book that could be used as inspirations for party games !The tile of the book could not be more apt as it is a heady cocktail of literature and twitter to become Twitterature.

P.S.: If you wish to read the full tweet stories of Hamlet, The Da Vinci Code, and Harry Potter (1-7), click here

While I attend quite a few of the ‘cultural’ performances and participate in a heritage walk or two every year, what I really look forward to every year are people-watching and the handicraft melas. The latter brings in artisans and their art and craft from all over the country, which is an opportunity for me to stock up on gifts for friends and family. I also look forward to seeing the installation or street art at Rampart Row, the venue of the main KGAF, not because I love installation art, but because I am always amazed at the creativity that gets shown year after year. Just see a sample from this year’s KGAF.

My main observation about the 2012 KGAF is that it was very different as compared to the KGAFs of previous years, and the ones that I have attended. The difference has not been due to the large variety of programmes as well as newer types of programmes offered, but rather on something else altogether. Let me elaborate.

For the first time, I was not impressed by the handicrafts mela as I found the quality and pricing of products to be disproportionate. I came away without buying a single product—a first for me. The art installations, though interesting, did not throw up anything spectacular or different. But the biggest difference lay in the people who visited the KGAF.

The popularity of the festival has been growing over the years and if the crowds I saw on my visit yesterday are any indication, then this year has been very, very popular. Rampart Row was quite crowded when I arrived at noon yesterday, and the numbers just kept swelling and by 5.00 pm I could not even see the road that I was walking on. It seemed like the entire population of Mumbai and their cameras was at the KGAF.

It was a crowd that was rude and aggressive, a crowd that pushed and shoved its way through. It was an ill-mannered crowd, and a crowd that was not here to take in the festival, but rather to record it on their cameras. Sample this: I had to wait for about 10 minutes to photograph an installation art on the Buddha. When my turn came and I was about to take a photograph a young man just came and stood in front of me and started taking photographs. I tapped him on his shoulder and pointed out politely that this was not done. His response? That it was my problem, not his ! Then there was another instance where an elderly man was knocked down by the tripod of a photographer, who was carelessly swinging it around. Instead of apologising, the photographer screamed at the elderly man ! I observed many such instances, but none that I would like to share here—its too depressing. People-watching actually took on an entirely new meaning, and for the first time I didn’t like being at the KGAF.

In my post on the 2011 edition of the KGAF, I had said that the festival is a metaphor for Mumbai, a reflection of what the city is in all its various shades and hues.This year too, if one can take the art installations or visual arts as a bench mark, then the city is classy, kitschy, bizarre, trite, queer, and morbid at the same time. And if one extends the same analogy to city based on the people visiting the KGAF, then I would have very unpleasant things to say about the city

I almost missed the KGAF this year as I was travelling. After my visit yesterday, I wish that I had given it a miss.

Google Doodle on 7 February 2012, in memory of Charles Dickens' 200th birth anniversary

This charming doodle evoked the era and times of the world that the characters from Dickens’ books inhabited. Surely one can see the ghost from A Christmas Carol as well as Fagin from Oliver Twist, and Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop in the doodle? And is that an adult David Copperfield in the curve of the second ‘g’ in the doodle? Or is it Nicholas Nickleby?

I love and loathe Charles Dickens or rather his characters in equal measure. David Copperfield is one of my favourite books, and I love the curmudgeonly Miss Copperfield, just as I loathe Fagin from Oliver Twist. When I read The Old Curiosity Shop, I cried over Nell’s fate and her loneliness. I found Great Expectations tedious and Nicholas Nickleby boring and worthy of a Bollywood film ! A Tale of Two Cities was incomprehensible the first time I read it; it took me a second reading of the book to appreciate the nuances and the plot. Love him or loathe him, one can never be indifferent to Charles Dickens.

That is the reason that there are so many museums and festivals dedicated to Charles Dickens across the world. One such place is  Rochester, in the Kent region of England, which hosts a Summer Dickens Festival every May, and a Dickensian Christmas every December. The Festivals give an opportunity for the townspeople to dress up in Dickensian costumes and have a good time. There is a lot of street entertainment, folk music, Punch and Judy shows, and readings from Charles Dickens’ books. In addition to this, the Swiss chalet like house that Dickens lived in while based in Rochester is open to the public.

All this makes Rochester a perfect place for tourists to visit. I was fortunate to visit Rochester in May 2009 on the last day of the Summer Dickens Festival. Some memories from that visit:

The people in Dickensian costumes seemed very much at home in Rochester in England. I was the one who felt out-of-place here in my jeans and T-shirt

More people in costume from Dickensian times at Rochester. And don't miss the restaurant's name

I wonder which Dickensian character the man in brown coat represents. An adult David Copperfield perhaps?

While London does not have a festival dedicated to Dickens, it does have a Charles Dickens Museum (which to my everlasting regret I did not visit), and Dickens memorabilia in unexpected places.

A mural on Marylebone Road (London) marking the place where Charles Dickens lived for a while and created 6 memorable characters from his books

I stumbled across this charming shop in central London. No, this is not the original, Dickensian one, but only a recreation of what it must have been like !

To be honest, I never meant to write a post on Dickens or his 200th birthday for that matter. But the beautiful and charming Google doodle proved irresistible. I just had to dig into my digital library and pull out the relevant photographs associated with Charles Dickens and share them with you here. Hope you enjoyed it.

P.S.: Who is your favourite character from a Charles Dickens book?

When I checked out the organ at the Cathédrale St. Pierre at Geneve or St. Pierre’s Cathedral at Geneva, Switzerland, a shiver did go down my spine, but for entirely different reasons !

The "spooky" looking organ in the St.Pierre Cathedral at Geneva

The organ had the most unusual design—imposing and spooky at the same time. Set in a Cathedral with a romanesque exterior (complete with a neo-classical façade), and a gothic spire and interiors, the setting was quite dramatic considering the Cathedral’s history.

It’s austere, whitewashed interiors hide colourful and intricate murals and its unadorned, bare  walls are mute spectators to the Catholic cleansing that occurred during the Reformation and the subsequent change of the St. Pierre from a Catholic to a Protestant place of worship. Only the stained glass windows were left untouched. As for the organ, it was deemed too grand and unsuitable for Protestantism. According to the Cathedral’s website, ” The history of the organ of the Cathedral is linked to that of the place, but it is also a reflection of the history of music”.

The St.Pierre Cathedral’s organ was designed by Zurich Metzler and Danish Andersen, and installed in 1965 to “to address the return to authentic performances of baroque and classical works”. The bloody and violent history of the Reformation and the Protestantism and the organ design do make for an interesting combination.

I can’t attest to the quality of sound or music of the organ as I did not get an opportunity to hear a performance. But I can definitely attest for its spookiness and my echoing steps in the deep, cavernous, austere and practically empty interiors of the St.Pierre Cathedral only added to the entire effect.

Do you think it will snow in London this season?

I don’t think the poor guy expected to be asked this question. He gaped at me and stammered out something about the fickle English weather, climate change and global warming in one confusing reply and sent me on my way.

I wasn’t about to give up so easily and in the first few weeks after my arrival, I badgered everyone with this question—from the cab driver who drove me to my hostel from the airport to the cleaning crew in my hostel to the canteen staff to the scholarships advisor to my teachers to the supermarket employees to my classmates to my flatmates to… You get the picture, na?

The reason I was so keen on getting an answer to my question was because I had never experienced snow before and my stay in London offered the best possible opportunity to experience it or so I thought. Since was I impatient to get a definite answer to fulfilling my experience, I didn’t spare anybody. What I didn’t know or understand then was the vagaries of the famous English weather, and that it was quite impossible to give an answer to my “simple” question.

Frost-covered grounds of the Regent's Park on Diwali Day in 2008

While in London, I stayed at the International Students House and was privileged and fortunate to have a room that looked out into the beautiful Regent’s Park. It became a habit to look out of my window as soon as I woke up in the morning. So imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning, about a month or so after I had arrived in London, to see white-coloured park grounds. Snow ! I was so excited that I just threw on a coat over my night-clothes, grabbed my camera and went running out of the hostel much to the bemusement of the receptionist. I discovered later that the white stuff was not snow, but frost and over the next 3 months or so experienced many a false alarm over snow.

And then when the God of Snow finally took pity on me, I was too busy completing an assignment that I had to submit the next day to even register that it was snowing outside !  It was a Monday morning, the second day of February 2009. As was my habit, on waking up at 7.00 am, I went to open my window to look out into the Regent’s Park. To my surprise, I could not open my window and worse, I could not see anything through the panes, as they were frosted over. That’s when I realised what had happened and in great excitement and no less struggle, finally managed to open the window to see this

Winter wonderland that was Regent's Park

A snowy, winter wonderland beckoned and in no time I was appropriately dressed to enjoy and experience the snow with my friends. Presenting some memories from that day:

The dalmatian was quite excited about the snow and pranced all over the place. This was one of those moments when he stilled for a second. His owner was laughing so hard at his dog's antics that we could hear him some distance away.

Meet Snowy, the handsomest snowman in the whole park.

Snowfight !!!

The frozen Regent's pond

As you can see from the photographs, I had fun. Lots of fun. It snowed on and off the whole day and we also kept going to and coming from Regent’s Park the whole day in between lots of hot chocolate, popcorn, cheese toast sandwiches and soup. And of course building snowmen and indulging in snow fights as well. In between all this, I found time to slip and slide my way to my University for my morning class and to hand over the assignment that I had so diligently slaved over the previous night.

It never occurred to me that the University could be closed and classes cancelled due to snowfall. The security guard was aghast that I had made it and gave me an earful on stupid behaviour and not checking the University website before venturing out. I told him, and rather loftily I must say, that when monsoon rains don’t faze me in Mumbai, what is a little snow in London !

It’s my snowversary in a couple of days and I am feeling nostalgic, which is making me all happy and cozy and warm and contented

The Jade Bull

I met this bull in December 2008 during one of my many visits to the British Museum London. I can’t remember the details now, but I think he was part of a visiting exhibition from a museum in China, and not part of the British Museum’s collection (they don’t have any information on this bull on their website).

Yes, this is not a real bull, but believe me staring out of his cabinet at the British Museum he looked real enough. He was no bigger than my palm, and yet every feature of his was clearly visible, right down to slightly flared nostrils. Carved out of very dark green jade, he looked very much alive and full of barely suppressed energy. It was almost as if he was just waiting for an opportunity to break free from his confinement. He could have been the proverbial bull in a museum china shop !

So, what do you think?

My now song is “Kangna” by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Mohammad. Do watch the video and listen to the song before you read the rest of the post.

One of my colleagues, AS, is an amateur musician. Thanks to him, I get to listen to a wide range of music and though not all the genres are unfamiliar, some of the artistes definitely are, like this one.

Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad are brothers and qawwali singers from Pakistan and this short 16-minute piece in Raga Malkauns is mind-blowing, particularly the first 4 minutes. I have always found Raga Malkauns to be sombre and serious, but this rendering was so different—mischievous and light-hearted. I also like the way some Farsi lines have been woven with the traditional brajbhasha lyrics. And I am amazed how Fareed Ayaz is able to sing with a mouth full of paan !

I like this song so much that I am listening to this song even as I type out this post.  Thanks, AS, for recommending this song

Photo Source: http://www.firstpost.com

The background

I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to review Balasaraswati: Her Art & Life by Douglas M. Knight Jr. (Tranquebar Press, 2011). All I was aware of at that time was the fact that I would be reading about a person I “knew”. Let me elaborate here.

Amma (my mother) grew up on a diet of classical music and dance. A student of Carnatic classical music, she was fortunate to watch many musicians and dancers perform, one of whom was Balasaraswati herself. Amma worshipped and idolised her as only a true rasika can. I started attending kacheris (music performances) and dance performances with Amma when I was 5. After each performance there would be a discussion on what we liked or did not like, and we would try sing the pieces we liked. If it was a dance performance that we had attended, the discussion would begin with the dance, then move on to the music, and finally to the inevitable mention of how Balasaraswati would have performed a particular dance item. By the time I was 6 or 7, I knew who Balasaraswati was, what her dance was like, and how she danced—all this without ever having seen her dance. But thanks to Amma’s vivid descriptions, and whenever Amma herself sang, I could and would imagine Balasaraswati dancing to them ! Such was her impact on me.

In reading the book, Balasaraswati went from being an artist I “knew” in my imagination to a “flesh and blood” artist who emerged from book’s narrative. An artist, a dancer, a woman, a human being with a life story made Balasaraswati gain a form that was much more real than my imagination. Both the Balasaraswatis were very different when I began reading the book and by the time I finished, they had merged to become one person. It took me a little while to internalise all this and then attempt to write a book review, which I can only hope is reasonably objective.

Source: https://www.indianfolklore.org

The book review

Thanjavur Balasaraswati (1918–1984) is considered to be amongst the greatest performing artists of the twentieth century. And yet, many people of my generation (I’m a child of the 1970s) and after do not seem to know about her life, her dance or the wealth and intangible heritage her art represents

So it is, perhaps, fortunate that a biography on Balasaraswati has just been published in India.  What makes this biography special is that the author is Balasaraswati’s son-in-law. Being a member of the family, Knight was able to draw upon his own interactions with Balasaraswati and other family members and include them in the book, along with his own exhaustive research on the topic. Also included in the book are many photographs of Balasaraswati, historical photographs of Chennai, as well as photographs of well-known musicians, dancers, and dance teachers. The hardcover book is divided into 7 chapters and has notes on translation, transliteration and dates; a preface; a select biography of people mentioned in the book; as well as extensive notes, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index—all this is packed in 326 pages, plus 22 preliminary pages.

Hailing from a matrilineal community devoted to music and dance as a profession, Balasaraswati was a 7th-generation performing artist from a family belonging to this community. She is, perhaps, the only dancer of her time who followed the traditional style of the dance form that was known as sadir till the early 1900s; a dance form that later came to be known as bharatanatyam. She was born at a time when proponents and reformers of this classical dance form were trying to give this a new identity and make it respectable, and attempting to dissociate from the devadasi community—the community that had nurtured this dance form for centuries and the community that Balasaraswati belonged to.

The book traces Balasaraswati’s lineage to set the context of the centuries-old heritage, tradition and legacy that she was a bearer of. This is done through a look at the development of bharatanatyam itself, the devadasi system, and the royal patronage received by the artists, particularly from the Thanjavur Kingdom. Around the time that Balasaraswati was born in 1918, the matrilineal system that had nurtured this art form and its artists for generations was under serious threat. Traditional artists from the community had stopped giving dance performances in public, and had switched over to music and solo performances. Many artists were living in penury.

Balasaraswati started learning dance at the age of 4 at the insistence of her mother Jayammal, and after much opposition from her grandmother, the legendary Veena Dhanammal. This marked the end of Balasaraswati’s childhood and the beginning of 16-hour practice days with dance lessons during the day and music lessons in the evenings. Thus began Balasaraswati’s initiation into an art form, a tradition and a life that her family and community members had protected and practised for generations. But she was not to receive the royal patronage that her ancestors had enjoyed or the societal appreciation and approval that they had received. Hers was a journey that gave recognition and pain in equal measures—perhaps more of the latter than the former. She was a dancer who sang and a singer who danced and probably remains the only one ever to sing as she danced. For her dance was an extension of music—indeed it was a visual representation of music.

Photo Source: http://www.thehindu.com

Balasaraswati danced at a time when her own community shunned dance in preference to music. She (and the traditional art form she represented) weathered years of neglect and slander by the larger society she was part of. Her simple, perhaps even austere, presentation of bharatanatyam was ridiculed in an increasingly stylised presentation of this dance form with respect to stage props and costumes. She lived through the stigma of being labelled a devadasi, of not being invited for public performances, and of being ignored and deliberately overlooked by the new patrons of art—the government. She danced through a heart condition, a thyroid problem, and complications arising from diabetes. She was an international celebrity and yet was shunned in her own country for a long time.

It took time for her art to be acknowledged by the Government of India, with the Padma Vibhushan being the highest honour that she received. She remains, till date, the only dancer to have received the title of Sangitha Kalanidhi (Treasure of the Art of Music). In a memoriam written after Balasaraswati’s death in 1984, Narayana Menon (Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi) had this to say:

Balasaraswati became a legend when she lived. (pg.1)

The verdict

The author gives a disclaimer right in the beginning of the book that it is not his intention for the book to be a discourse on India’s social or socio-religious issues at the beginning of the 20th century or the devadasi system. But intentionally or unintentionally, Knight does provide the reader with such a perspective and it is a perspective that is quite different from what is available in popular or academic literature. It is a perspective that looks at the transmission and preservation of an oral tradition and an intangible artistic heritage through generations. It is a perspective that looks at how the introduction of the legislation, supposedly to protect the devadasis from exploitation, actually killed a centuries-old tradition. All this is woven in beautifully with Balasaraswati’s journey of rejection, disapproval, pain, loss, and struggle for acceptance. It is an account that is narrated with dignity and as much objectivity as a researcher, who is also a family member, can have.

It is impossible for the reader to not feel all these emotions while reading the book. Indeed, Balasaraswati’s extraordinary journey is something that needs to be read in this book and not just as a review here. Though it is a book about Balasaraswati, her art and her life,  it is also a book on a way of life that does not exist anymore, and of an art form that has changed beyond recognition.

It is a book that made me wish that I had seen Balasaraswati dance, at least once.

♦   ♦   ♦   ♦   ♦

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